After your spiritual teacher falls off his or her pedestal, what do you do? Learning that a long-revered figure was not the exemplar you long believed them to be can be gutting — and confusing. How might one move through shock, and eventually integrate the new knowledge? I started going through this process myself about a year ago, and during this time, have had many conversations with others with ties to the same organization. I share some ideas here in case any of them are helpful to others. But first, a couple of caveats. Caveat 1: I’m not a psychologist or a social worker. I do have some life experience and professional background that informs what I’ll share, and have been kinda obsessed with learning about exposed gurus, high control groups, recovery and the like over the past year. However, I’m still in the midst of my own processing. And I don’t pretend that my understanding or ideas will serve everyone else who might find themselves in a similar position. (See disclaimer.) I invite you to add any of your own insights or suggestions in the comments, if you are so moved. Caveat 2: Each person’s process — and pace — may be different. Absorbing and adjusting to stunning new information about a significant figure in one’s spiritual life is not a one-and-done event. It is an ongoing process. It may stretch over months, or years — just as the process of integrating the practices, community, and zeitgeist of your group into your life and being was likely a long, gradual process. That said, following are a series of principles I offer for your consideration. In practice, all of these realms intertwine; adapting is an iterative and holistic process, not a linear one made up of discrete steps. Befriend Your Feelings The new information about the leader / teacher, and its implications, are likely to generate a great variety of feelings in you. Emotions are a normal, healthy, human response to our experiences. No feeling is bad. And no feeling is final. Whether you prefer talking aloud to others, or writing in a journal, putting words to your feelings can help you recognize and accept what you are going through. It may also help your loved ones to understand how big of a deal the new revelations are. My previous post, All the Feels, is an example of naming feelings (mine). That post includes a handful of feeling wheels. You may find one or more of these feeling wheels useful as tools for exploring your own emotions. Another one I like, the Emotion-Sensation wheel, helps make connections between what is happening in your brain and what is happening in your body. If you find it easier to notice your physical symptoms than to zero in on your thoughts and feelings, this wheel may be helpful. Having trouble accepting all of your feelings as okay? In the first couple of years after I left my job at the ashram and moved back to my previous life, a book that helped me a great deal was Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Brach had been through a betrayal by a spiritual teacher earlier in her life. Hmmm.) She has some guided meditations online that promote this kind of radical acceptance of oneself and one’s feelings. Seek Support If you have a long or deep association with the fallen teacher / group / practice, you will need support to work through this upending of your inner world. A friend or partner who is a good, nonjudgmental listener may be helpful. While you are feeling tender, this is probably not the best time to bring in that pal who was skeptical of your spiritual group all along; “I told you so” vibes may only add to your feeling of vulnerability. Who from your life do you trust as a caring witness? There’s nothing quite like talking with other peers who share the same spiritual practice and affiliation. They can “get it” like no one else can. (Not that everyone will have identical reactions.) If you have a local or online practice group, can you connect with those folks, either altogether, or 1:1? Or perhaps you know people from retreats that you could reach out to. A therapist can also be an indispensable partner in your processing. My therapist has gotten an earful from me over the past year. She is a consummate listener; she doesn’t even have to say much for me to feel seen and validated. My therapist has also seen how my involvement with this group/practice, and the wrenching new revelations, fits in with the rest of my life history and post-traumatic growth. It may help your therapist help you if they are familiar with betrayal trauma. Better still if they know something about high control groups. Most therapists have not received education on such groups as part of their training. This article from Shelly Rosen, likening experiences with such groups/leaders to natural disasters, can be shared with your mental health provider. Mine found it helpful. To the extent that other people associated with my old group have formed a strong attachment to the founder/teacher, they may experience some degree of betrayal trauma in relation to the teacher proving unworthy of the trust they’ve given him. Separately, they may experience betrayal by the institution. The meditation center has, so far, remained in adamant denial of any possible misdeed by the founder, despite multiple credible allegations. The organization’s failure to act with integrity, when confronted about his misconduct, constitutes an additional betrayal. For anyone who had much of a relationship with the teacher (live or spiritual-psychological), and with the community that has offered programs and built relationships in his name, such betrayals are substantial. You need and deserve support as you deal with them. What About My Practice? This is an area for ongoing discernment for each person. There’s no one right answer. (That is, assuming that the practices one has carried on are harmless at worst. Sometimes the devil is in the details of how one implements a particular discipline — and that can be tweaked, if desired.) I found myself leery of meditation and other practices associated with my group, after I learned about the serious allegations against its founder (summarized in previous post). Ironically, the disorientation the new information prompted in me led me to want the steadying power of my old practices. But after sitting down to meditate several times without being able to actually get the peace I craved — my mind would just spin around on the new learnings, feelings, and questions I had — I realized I couldn’t force it. Anyway, there are many other things I can do to regulate my emotions and my nervous system — which I did instead. Walking in nature, taking it all in with my senses, is my favorite of all self-regulating activities. Good for body, mind and spirit. And working on myself with massage balls, doing self-myofascial release on a yoga mat, has become a go-to as well. At later points, I have come back to meditation and other practices. More when it welled up instinctively in me, reaching for a familiar tool, than when I made a conscious choice to do it. For me it has been important to choose any practice for my own reasons, and to do it on my own terms — including how, how long, and how often I meditate. When I do them, I am motivated by the benefits I directly experience in doing my old group’s method of meditation, or other practices. But I think it’s equally legit to choose to forego any of the practices indefinitely, while doing the emotional, cognitive, and spiritual work brought up by the new knowledge of the teacher and group. One can always pick back up with a practice later. One person mentioned to me that yoga and pouring himself into music have been his go-to activities lately, instead of meditation. He has recognized what will best meet his needs for centering and emotional processing right now. The old method of meditation is too fraught to be that thing for him right now — and perhaps he’ll never choose it again. I know some people affiliated with my old group who have chosen to stick with their spiritual practices. The only thing they have changed is to stop reading the teacher’s writings or listening to his recorded talks; they favor original sources for inspirational material (e.g., reading the Upanishads or the Dhammapada), rather than commentaries or other teachings by the meditation center’s founder. They still largely follow the program of spiritual practices he outlined; but they no longer consider him their spiritual teacher. Others have pursued new spiritual practices, finding that the long-used methods had ceased to help them meet their goals, even before they learned about the teacher’s past transgressions. That new knowledge has helped them feel freer now to try something else. All of these choices and more are available to a person who is integrating new information about the founder/group, and reassessing their relationship to all of it. You might even make one choice now, and a different choice later. What feels right for you? Making Sense of It I remember when I left my job at the ashram and moved back “home” years ago. I had a LOT to process from my journey with the group. But I wondered if this was self-indulgent somehow. Was I just navel-gazing if I spent time writing or talking about those experiences? I even confessed to one of my fellow meditator YAs, who had left after I did, “at times I wondered if this was a rather narcissistic exercise … the hours I spent on it.” My best friend — who had been through A LOT of therapy herself, and was better for it — said something very wise to me. It helped me then, and it has come back to me many times since. “It’s important to make sense of your experience,” she observed. And indeed, that was exactly what prompted me to reflect and chew on my California year. I needed to understand what I had been through. I needed to find words for what I’d felt. And I wanted explanations for why the community had behaved the way it did. I didn’t want confusion to be my final feeling. I had written a five-page email explaining my experience, after my last day of work. This was after a friend from my cohort of young adult meditators, who was considering making a cross-country move to be closer, asked me why I was leaving. Was there anything he should know? he wondered. I’m so glad I wrote to him, instinctively, while it was fresh. A year and a half later, when I was safely re-established in my old city, returned to my old career and my long-time friends, choir and church community — and having the sense of groundedness, again at last, that having bought a house can bring — I was ready for a deeper dive. At that time (16 years ago to the day as I type this), I wrote a “letter” to the then-head of the meditation center; I’ll call her Katarina. One of the reasons I wrote, as I told her, was that “I believe naming these things will help me to integrate my experiences and continue to grow spiritually.” My “letter” to Katarina turned into an almost 60-page missive. There are sections on my path to that community, on what I experienced in the year I spent working there, on the “inscrutable ashram” (yep yep, inscrutable, though I did my best as an applied sociologist to make a case study of it), and on my “stabilization and realignment” (how I made my way forward after leaving). If the depth of my processing and the length of my writing were a good indication (and I believe they were), my friend had been quite right — it was important for me to make sense of my experiences! I started that tome with stating the things about which I felt gratitude — what I had learned from that community that I would carry forward with me. That felt kind of compulsory, as I recall. Partly, in order to be heard in the ashram’s culture of conspicuous humility and bubbling gratitude; if I didn’t demonstrate appreciation first, she might not be open to what I had to say next. Partly, it was simply that those values and behaviors were still so internalized in me that it was second nature for me to start with an extensive write-up expressing my gratitude. Otherwise, I would have felt myself to be selfishly unappreciative. Those dynamics aside, I suspect something like the gratitude list IS an important piece for many people in a time of integration or reassessment. It’s a cognitive and emotional part of the process of sorting through the meaning of one’s experiences. No one wants to feel their time was simply wasted. (And it rarely is.) If you are now in a similar period of taking stock, you might ask yourself — for what am I grateful? What do I choose to keep? What is of lasting value to me from this set of experiences? I did put that “letter” to Katarina in the mail. I hoped that it might be helpful to the community she led, to understand what one person experienced there and why I ultimately left. Perhaps, I thought, it would help them make their community more effective in the future. (You see how my pure, trusting heart survived my dark-year-of-the-soul there, intact?! Nothing changed, alas. From what others have shared, it seems the organization became only more rigid and unhealthy as the years rolled on. But I was still operating with a generous spirit and best-case thinking then — ever holding out hope for them.) Katarina wasn’t capable of really hearing what I shared. I hadn’t asked for any response beyond acknowledgment that she had received it. She did answer me, though. She suggested I must have misunderstood the support structures the community had created for its new YA employees. It wasn’t paternalism. Oh, no. If I had communicated more clearly, they would have helped me. She said she hoped that I might draw closer to the organization again some day. I remember reading her response in bewilderment. Um, did you read what I so painstakingly wrote, Katarina? I mean, I was not unkind, but I described some really deep problems that I found not only confounding, but fundamentally unhealthy. For anyone, but certainly, for me. How could you think I would ever come back to that? Not happening. So my heartfelt reflection did not appear to have been received in a constructive way by the organization. They couldn’t really hear it. (Hmm, feels familiar.) But it had served its purpose as part of my own integration and moving forward. Indeed, it was important to make sense of my experience. And for me, writing has always been one of the most effective ways to do that. I would go through later cycles of revisiting my experiences with that community, and seeing new layers of meaning in it. Particularly, when I was in theological school. But until recently, I was missing a critical insight. The new information that has emerged about the founder has finally allowed me to understand more fully the nature of the organization. And that, in turn, has released me more fully to move forward in my own spirituality and vocation. If you are in a similar time of reckoning, what kinds of activities, what modes of expression, help you to process emotionally, to sort things out cognitively, to integrate past experiences and allow your understanding to evolve? Such activities might include talking, prose, or poetry… music, collage, or painting… or ___ [ your thing here ] ___ . If your mind works in images, but you don’t like to make art yourself, you might try working with something like Soul Cards. The cards feature evocative imagery by artist Deborah Koff-Chapin. I have both sets, and I find them a good way to listen for my deepest self / intuitive mind / image-oriented part of me. They come with a variety of suggestions for use. I choose one or a few that speak to me and live with them for a while. They have proved meaningful to others in small group spiritual direction. This might be a way to listen to your inner child or your inner teacher as you are processing your feelings around your old group, and discerning what is next for you. Seeking Safely For anyone who no longer considers an old group’s founder as their spiritual teacher, or the program as their (exclusive) program, the world is your oyster. It’s also a bit of a wild, wild West of teachers, groups and programs promising spiritual growth, personal development, healing and so on — with plenty of grifters and opportunists mixed in with sincere folks. The internet has created new ways of connecting — YouTube, for example, is crowded with self-proclaimed teachers, coaches, channelers, and shamans. And there are still plenty of brick-and-mortar retreat centers out there too. If you decide to explore new teachers / programs / groups, I encourage you to be intentional about seeking safely, to avoid having a problematic experience (again) in the future. Alas, it is not uncommon for a person to leave one group that turned out to have been manipulative or dishonest, only to end up in another one. As the proverb goes: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I shared some suggestions for safe seeking here. If you have additional suggestions, I welcome you to mention them in the comments. What Are Local Groups Doing? A lot of people with ties to my old meditation center participate(d) weekly in a local meditation group. Some even had retreats put on in their area periodically. I’m aware of a number of local meditation groups that have grappled with the shocking allegations about the founder, and the organization’s non-response to it. Almost all of the ones I have heard about have eventually decided to disaffiliate from the organization, due to its failure to take credible allegations seriously and act accordingly. Some of those groups are dissolving; individuals are making their own decisions about their meditation practices. Other local meditation groups have decided to keep meeting, but change up what inspirational material they are working with together. They are taking the focus off of the old meditation teacher. One group in New York has even created a new regional collaboration, and is offering their first retreat (online) this month. They aim to continue providing spiritual support and companionship to participants, just no longer focused on the old meditation center and its teacher. Online study groups have a similar choice of whether to disband or simply change focus, drawing on materials beyond the old founder-teacher. In the resources section that follows, I mention some books and other materials that may be of interest to either individuals or groups who are broadening their source material. Resources Looking for SPIRITUAL READING for yourself or a group? Here are some suggestions: Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics: Lifestyles for Spiritual Wholeness by Marsha Sinetar. I don’t remember how I came across this book. But I read it after I left my ashram job, as I was integrating what I’d experienced there and seeking my own path, with a greater sense of freedom and self-trust. I have re-read it several times. Part of why I put this title at the top of this list as that it encourages people to find their own way — there is no one-size-fits-all program for spiritual growth or living. I also loved some autobiographical stuff I read: those of Etty Hillesum (An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork), Karen Armstrong (post-ashram, I read The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, she has two earlier ones also), and as I’ve mentioned already, Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance, which draws from painful personal experience and held important messages for me in my recovery. I had previously read Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words, which a friend from my former local meditation group had recommended to me. (I think I ordered it from the foundation created by friends of Peace Pilgrim, https://www.peacepilgrim.org/ … probably also available used.) All four of these have in common that they were by and about women. That felt especially important to me, for reasons I understand more fully now! The first three were also people who had flawed teachers and who found their own way forward. A few other random thoughts:
Want to learn about HIGH CONTROL GROUPS, and inoculate yourself against future manipulation? Many of my online pieces address this:
Book suggestions:
Podcasts — There are many podcasts out there on high control groups aka cults. The ones I have listened to the most are:
Lastly, SUPPORT GROUPS & WEBINARS for survivors of high control environments. These may be most helpful for people who have been in deep (such as living or working at the ashram). Although one can be psychologically “in deep” even from a geographic distance. Some resources on my radar:
Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up. Meanwhile, here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇 The End of Silence … A Spiral Season … How I Was Primed Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.
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